Re: Kernel 2.6.16 idle scheduling

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 07:32 -0600, Pat Double wrote:
> On Monday 27 March 2006 06:51, Pat Double wrote:
> > Kernel 2.6.16 has a new scheduling priority SCHED_IDLEPRIO. Currently
> > beagled attempts to run some things using "ionice" but this requires root
> > priviledges. SCHED_IDLEPRIO can be set by the user.
> >
> > Would it be acceptable to change beagled to use this instead of ionice when
> > a 2.6.16 kernel is detected? How about beagled setting itself to this
> > priority when started?
> 
> OK, bad form replying to myself, but I was mistaken. It is the ck patchset 
> that has SCHED_IDLEPRIO. Still, I think it would be worthwhile to investigate 
> this. The patchset is popular.

Is there any hope for this to go into the mainline kernel?  I'm
reluctant to add support for it until it's in, because the API can
change.  Anyone who ran Beagle before inotify went in can testify to
that.

The reason why ionice is root-only is because unprivileged processes can
effectively block access to any other process by opening files and being
unable to do any IO because other processes are using it.  Do you know
if that DoS is possible with this patch?

Thanks,
Joe